188 quotes found
“A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. Value is that which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue is the action by whic...”
“The anti-mind is the anti-life.”
“Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automati...”
“Man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the childs education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is f...”
“Mans life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking beingnot life by means of force or fraud, but life by m...”
“There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Mans Life is its standard of value.All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is t...”
“Mans life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose . If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to manf...”
“Man has the power to act as his own destroyerand that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”
“Reason is your means of survival so that for you, who are a human being, the question to be or not to be is the question 'to think or not to think..'.”
“Mans mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he mu...”
“It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the worlds doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuriesto remain hu...”
“Through all the ages the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiterevery form of iniquity: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriationeve...”
“Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?”
“The source of work? Mans mind...mans reasoning mind.”
“Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess.”
“He did not know that he was expected to attempt to buy his way into society and that they anticipated the pleasure of rejecting him. He had no time to notice their disappointment.”
“...there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers.”
“Dagny," he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, "think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He di...”
“It is a policemans duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policemans duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of...”
“...they want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us.”
